


The Etchings On Your Skin

by Dikhotomia



Series: Whumptober 2k19: FE3H Edition [15]
Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Day 15 Scars, Edelgard and Rhea have a moment, F/F, I need to think of an offical verse name for this, same verse as Truth Between The Lines, that tension is back and hooboy is it increasing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-16
Updated: 2019-10-16
Packaged: 2020-12-20 18:55:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21061538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dikhotomia/pseuds/Dikhotomia
Summary: ""You have other things on your mind."She jumps, twitching back when Rhea is suddenly so close, her hand warm where it sits on her forearm, the project to remove her other gauntlet forgotten in her retreat into her mind. "I was...thinking about how best to proceed with the war effort." She would resist and advance where she could, try and hold her territory no matter what. But all she could do was wait for the new information the spies she had in place would bring."OREdelgard tells Rhea her story.





	The Etchings On Your Skin

**Author's Note:**

> Y'all I gotta thank you again for the comments you left on the first fic in this verse cuz I was suuuppperr unsure about even posting it and not rewriting it with a different idea I had. Uh, so yea. I hope you enjoy this one too.

Rhea watches her silently from the corner of the room she'd been given, curled up, book resting across her knees. It's been forgotten with Edelgard's entrance into the room, cloak sliding from her shoulders and steps frustrated. She hears as the other woman unfolds and shuts her book, setting it aside on the small table.

"What happened?" She asks, her voice low and quiet, something meant to be calming that only reminds Edelgard of the odd limbo their relationship hangs in. They're not friends, but not enemies anymore either. They just _are_.

"Thales was displeased I decided to allow you to stay closer to me," she replies, planting a heel and turning to face the older woman. "Hubert didn't approve either. I was met with a great amount of grievance." She remembers the moment she decided to do it then when she meets Rhea's quiet gaze. The sight of her face bruised and the split on her nose and lip that had since healed had driven her to make the choice. Thales wouldn't touch her here.

No one would, no one but her.

"I did tell you it would not go well."

It's much the same thing she's heard already, over and over. The warnings that Rhea would kill her in her sleep or attack her as soon as she let her guard down. It baffles her that even Rhea warned her, but has done absolutely nothing to make her rethink what she'd chosen to do. _I trust you to do exactly what I expect you to do_ she'd said, and the thought still remains in the back of her mind. Yet Rhea barely, if ever, moves from the corner.

She has her books stacked on the table, the chair she'd taken over from the sitting room and the couch that has been made into a bed. She leaves it only to eat and to tend to more personal things. She has the full run of the rooms and only ever stays in one, the front room, away from where Edelgard spends most of her time when she's here.

"You've proven yourself an odd sort of trustworthy," she replies as she undoes the straps on her armor, sliding it off and setting it down. "If you were going to kill me you have had ample time to do it and chosen instead to not." She'd caught Rhea sleeping, caught her unawares more than once and done nothing herself.

_They just were._

Rhea's lips twitch in a faint smile, fingers tracing the spine of the book she'd been reading. "Then your retainer and your...'uncle' will have to accept this new arrangement." Her tone pulls a laugh from Edelgard's throat, her expression curving into a smile she didn't ever believe she would see on the Archbishop's face.  
It's just this short of mischievous.

"They will," she agrees, stripping one gauntlet off and starting on the second. "I told them as much." Hubert's worry she knew stemmed just from his concern for her, Thales' she knew stemmed from the control he was slowly losing over her. His plans both working out and spiraling out of his projected path. But her own plans had gone awry, Rhea's inclusion -- however slight -- had thrown everything off course. The older woman had offered methods and insights other people wouldn't dare throw at her. It had changed the way she approached things.

Just as the classmates that had chosen to follow her had. It had blunted her edges, made her less cold then she feared she would become. There was still things she had done that had put her under fire, things Those Who Slither had done that she'd turned a blind eye to and continued to do so, but the things she had been willing to do before weren't things she was as willing to do now.

But Byleth and her forces still advanced. Petra had come that morning with a report, the forces she had sent to the monestary had been pushed back and Randolph's loss sits heavy on her shoulders. The Knights had reformed under a new banner bearing the crest of flames and people who resisted her had flocked to them.  
The Alliance, Petra had said, then asked how they would proceed.

"You have other things on your mind."

She jumps, twitching back when Rhea is suddenly so close, her hand warm where it sits on her forearm, the project to remove her other gauntlet forgotten in her retreat into her mind. "I was...thinking about how best to proceed with the war effort." She would resist and advance where she could, try and hold her territory no matter what. But all she could do was wait for the new information the spies she had in place would bring.

"I assume it has something to do with what you told me about the Professor?"

Edelgard freezes again, tilting her head to watch her face while she picked at one of the straps. "She's leading an alliance of former knights, students, staff and others who've either abandoned my army or come from other places across Fódlan. We've already had a few skirmishes with them." She doesn't need to say none of them have ended very well for her forces, since the look on Rhea's face tells her the other woman understands. But there's no ugly sneer like that time in her sitting room, her expression remaining entirely neutral.

Just not the neutral Edelgard had come to expect from her.

"You may have no choice but to negotiate with them." Rhea's fingers are warm where they touch the bare skin of her hand, tracing the scars there. It's idle, thoughtless. "I know you don't like the idea," she says, preempting the protest Edelgard now leaves to die in the back of her throat. "But your ultimate goal is to defeat them and should you lose now..."

Rhea doesn't need to finish the sentence.

There's still too much Hubert has yet to uncover, bait and traps that need to be laid to see if Thales would fall for or trip into. The war for unification was just the first step...and if she could get The Professor and the others to see it her way... "You're right," she mutters, frowning. "I will try to sway them to our side."

Rhea slips her other gauntlet off, reaching around her side to put it beside it's partner. She hadn't realized the older woman had released the hand she'd thoughtlessly left in her possession, startled that she had even allowed herself to let Rhea get as close as she is. Again her fingers run the scars ringing her own, tracing across the one's that dig through the backs of her hands.

"I believe you can," the Archbishop murmurs, mint eyes flicking up from her hands to meet her gaze. "While I don't at all agree with some of your methods and choices, you do...have everyone's best interest at heart."

Edelgard turns her hands over, resting them palm up against the other woman's. It's...strangely intimate. "I can't say I agreed with your methods or choices either, but knowing what I know now...I understand why you did some of the things you did." She didn't like it, but she could put herself in the other's shoes now. Could stand back and look from the perspective of a woman who'd gone through hell and crawled out unsteady but stronger for it.

Yet so alone at the same time.

She understood more than she had originally wanted to admit.

"I'm please that you've come to that understanding," Rhea says, and Edelgard blinks eyes dropping to a spot on the taller woman's collarbone. "But I fear I'm still rather in the dark. You've yet to tell me your full story."

_Help me understand how to help you better._

She feels the winding sense of anxiety and desire to pull away, to shut everyone out and retreat until her mind calms and the tension slips away. "I-" She thinks how Rhea had gone through the same war, finally choosing to dig up her trauma and share it with her.

Even if Edelgard had forced it.

Rhea says nothing, only curling her hands around one of Edelgard's own and they stay like that. Silence stretches, interrupted only by their combined breaths, by the slide of skin across skin as Rhea begins to run her thumb along her wrist. Slow. Comforting. There's nothing forced, yet she still feels as though she owes the other woman something now.

Slowly she withdraws, brushing her fingers along Rhea's palm as she does. Watches as the other's arms drop back to her sides, eyes searching her face, waiting. Watching. She undoes the buttons and the clasps of her shirt, fabric sliding down her skin as she shrugs it off and drops it, leaving it to pool around her feet.

"This is what they did to me," she whispers, not bothering to look at the mess of scars that wreath her upper body. She's seen them enough, lived through the terror and the agony of their infliction. "Because of the crest system, because they wanted the perfect emperor."

Rhea's breath catches hard in her throat, eyes widening in a mix of shock and sympathy Edelgard's not sure she wants. "May I?" she asks after a moment, one hand extended carefully, hovering just out of range of her shoulder.

"Yes."

The Archbishop's touch is just as warm, just as gentle, as it had been on her hands. Fingers slowly mapping the lines on her shoulders, circling her bicep and down to the ragged ones that wind her wrists. Edelgard talks while she does, voice low. Steady despite how off balance she feels. She tells Rhea her story in return for the one she was told, of her own trauma, her own torture. Of watching as her siblings succumbed to madness and paralysis of the others she had seen and heard come and go. Of the experiments. Of how suffocating she finds being trapped in doors for long periods became because of it. She trails off just as Rhea's fingers stop their path at the starburst scar radiating from the center of her chest.

Her touch lingers warm and persistent on her breastbone, not daring to dip any lower.

"Oh. Edelgard...I-"

"You don't have to say anything," she interrupts, covering the other woman's hand with one of her own. "It was time I told you, I've put it off long enough."

"Let me fight with you."

The words come as a surprise, leaving her baffled and blinking, jaw working as she seeks her own words to reply with. "I had the intention of allowing you-"

"No. Edelgard, that's not what I mean." Rhea's palm lays flat against her skin, pressing lightly until she can feel the beat of her own heart against it. "I want to help you now. I know it will likely have to be in secret to not alert Those Who Slither...but I cannot sit idly by anymore."

It stirs something deep in her chest, something she doesn't try to name but clings to nonetheless. It's familiar, but foreign all at once. "Alright," she replies, dropping her hand back to her side. "You may join me next time I go out to battle. But if you try to run-"

"You will cut me down, I expect nothing less."

Another step closer together and suddenly they've found themselves toeing a line different then the limbo they had previously been navigating. Rhea retreats back to her corner, returning to her chair and to her forgotten book, leaving her to finish pulling the rest of her armor off.

She heads deeper into her hall with a sense of renewed confidence and determination.

They could still win this.


End file.
